A retired attorney (mostly tired and quit), Robert Gottlieb
maintained a private practice in Los Angeles and San Diego for a total of 36
years.

Robert Gottlieb

Robert began his general practice focusing primarily on
business clients, and in the 1980s began representing insurance company
clients. His career as a lawyer provides the backdrop of experience against
which he has painted with a broad stroke the disillusionment and exhaustion
that haunt the majority of attorneys practicing today.

Born in Los Angeles, Robert lived most of his early life in
the San Fernando Valley. He attended public school and graduated from law
school in Los Angeles.

Early in his days as a practicing attorney, Robert began
making and saving notes involving situations with clients, prospective clients,
courtroom proceedings, and the humorous and often absurd stories related to him
by other attorneys. It didn’t take long to realize that the practice of law,
like any other business, is about people much more than about the law itself.

In the mid- to late 1990s, Robert began to create narratives
from hi notes. No Nude Swimming is his first novel.

The main character in his novel is attorney Sam Weisman. His
wife wants a divorce, and his law practice is threatened by a hostile takeover.
Pulled one way by two hilarious con artists who plan to steal his dreams, and
another by his family and the real estate professional who's worked her way
into his heart, Sam struggles to hold onto his sanity, his self-esteem, and the
woman he loves. Grasping the end of his rope in one hand and the end of his
rainbow in the other, he teeters between the abyss ... and the pot of
gold!

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Silence Bullies supports
educational programs for low-income, disadvantaged children, and ALL young people.

Bullying in Numbers:

Over 67% of students
believe schools respond poorly to bullying.

71% of students report
incidents of bullying as a problem at their school.

90% of 4th through 8th
graders report being victims.

1 in 10 students drop
out of school because of repeated bullying.

168,000 school
children miss school yearly due to bullying.

For Health and Safety
Professionals: Bullying Prevention and Intervention

Health and safety
professionals and volunteers are disturbed about the physical and psychosocial
harm experienced by many youths as a result of bullying by their peers. Bullying
among children is aggressive behavior that is persistent, intentional and
involves an imbalance of power or strength. Bullying can take many forms such
as: hitting or punching (physical bullying); teasing or name-calling (verbal
bullying); intimidation through gestures or social exclusion (nonverbal
bullying or emotional bullying); and sending insulting messages by e-mail (cyberbullying). There is no one single cause of bullying among
children. Rather, individual, family, peer, school, and community factors can
place a young person at risk for bullying his or her peers.

Effects Of Bullying

Bullying can be a sign of
other serious antisocial and/or violent behavior. Youth who frequently bully
their peers are more likely than others to:

·Get into frequent fights

·Be injured in a fight

·Vandalize property

·Steal property

·Smoke

·Use illicit substances

·Be truant from school

·Drop out of school

·Carry
a weapon Youth who are the targets of bullying behavior may
exhibit signs of:

Thoughts of suicide Research that looks at
the full range of bullying behaviors is finding that the incidence of bullying
in the United States is widespread and its consequences more enduring than
suspected. In a nationally representative survey of school children, nearly 30 percent
reported moderate and more frequent involvement in having been bullied, in
bullying or both within the school year. Whether they are perpetrators or
targets of bullying, these children face difficulties adjusting to their
environments, socially and emotionally.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Pennsylvania
powerbrokers abuse legal system to lock up political opponent

By
Dave Gahary

A law on
the books in the Keystone State intended to apply to individuals with mental
illness is now being used for a more sinister purpose: to involuntarily commit
political opponents who pose a threat to the established power structure in the
commonwealth’s capital. Andrew J. Ostrowski, a former Pennsylvania civil rights
attorney, found himself in the sights of the powers-that-be in Harrisburg, and
learned the hard way how the 1976 Mental Health Procedures Act (MHPA) is being
used to chill criticism of the power prism.

The MHPA
“establishes procedures for the treatment of mentally ill persons” and “set[s]
forth the Commonwealth’s policy and procedures regarding the provision of
mental health services.” Article III of the act defines the requirements and
limitations on involuntary emergency examination, treatment, and
hospitalization of individuals who present a “clear and present danger to
others.”

That key
phrase is defined as meaning “within the past 30 days the person has inflicted
or attempted to inflict serious bodily harm on another and that there is a
reasonable probability that such conduct will be repeated.” Longtime AMERICAN
FREE PRESS subscriber and supporter Dorene Shutz tipped off this reporter to
Ostrowski’s recent kidnapping.

“He is
awake to the corrupt courts,” she explained. On Aug. 26, this reporter spent
most of the day with Ostrowski, Ms. Shutz, and other mild-mannered patriots at
The Nationalist Times conference, and found all the participants to be
scholarly truth-seekers. None who were present that day could ever be
considered severely mentally ill and in need of involuntary treatment by even
the most incompetent authority, but that says nothing of corrupt authority.

Ostrowski
was born and raised in Lancaster, Pa., attended Millersville University, and
“was in the first graduating class at Widener University” in Harrisburg. “I
trained for several years in the formal legal law firm environment,” he told
AFP.

He soon
discovered, however, that his chosen profession as an “officer of the court”
wasn’t what he thought it might be. “I had been a practicing lawyer until 2010
when I ran into disciplinary issues,” he said, “and, as I distanced myself from
the formal practice and started to look at these things, I started to see that
there really was no basis for the licensing of the practice of law. The
licensing of the practice of law really is an impediment to everybody’s access
to justice, because your attorney is not free to advocate without risking his
or her own property.”

On Aug.
23, Ostrowski filed a motion, attacking what he saw as a corrupt system. “I
filed what is called a motion for declaratory relief,” he explained, “which is
a vehicle that gives you access to have declarations made that certain things
are constitutional, not constitutional, lawful, and unlawful. And I did it to
challenge the basis of the attorney law license. This . . . is a very
significant motion that really would upset the entire judicial structure in
this country.”

Sitting
at his desk on Sept. 19, Ostrowski found out how significant it really was. “I
posted a notice on Facebook and sent out emails notifying people I was going on
Facebook Live and, within 15 minutes of that, the police were at my door.”

Facebook
Live allows a user to broadcast live video streams, requiring nothing more than
a computer with a video camera and a Facebook account.

“I looked
out the front window,” he said, “and there was a cop climbing over my railing
to come around back, so I went around to the back door and locked it, and I
went on Facebook Live. And then somehow, they got a key and they came in with
gloves on and with their tasers pulled, three of them, a female and two males.”

The
webcam captured the interaction between Ostrowski and the police, who entered
his home without his permission. In the video, Ostrowski can be seen asking the
officers to show him their warrant. Viewers see an officer telling him they
have one but then forcingOstrowski from his desk before the video ends.

“They did
not have a proper warrant; they didn’t have any paperwork,” Ostrowski said. “I
had to kind of—as passively as I could—resist them dragging me into an
ambulance and throwing me in without seeing some paperwork.” The short trip
from his house to the ambulance was not without injury.

“I had
bruises and a cut on my wrist from the handcuffs,” he said. AFP asked what
happened next. “I was taken in to the local emergency room where they process
you,” he explained, “and then they sent me to [Brooke Glen Behavioral Hospital]
down in the Philadelphia suburbs. That was a horrific experience. It was clear
that the agenda was, as expressed to me by the doctor, to get me on some kind
of pharmaceuticals, and/or, if I refused or resisted, to have me placed
long-term, and do it involuntarily. He specifically advocated for that in the
hearing on Sept. 22.”

They held
him there for seven days, two days longer than Section 302 of the MHPA
ostensibly allows. Eventually a judge signed an order denying any commitment
petition.

“They
basically said I shouldn’t have been there,” explained Ostrowski. AFP asked if
he had any recourse, as the judge’s ruling can’t erase the fact that he had
been kept there against his will for all that time. “Of course, yes,” Ostrowski
said. “This is a gross violation of all my fundamental civil rights. There’s
not one that you can discount from it, [except] maybe cruel and unusual
punishment.” Alarmingly, this wasn’t the first time they came for Ostrowski,
“all directly related,” he believes, “to my advocacy efforts.”

“This is
the third time this year,” he explained. Ostrowski contends that the abuse of
this mental health law to truncate people’s due process rights is a clear
problem.

“This is
why AMERICAN FREE PRESS exists,” he said. “This is why The Nationalist Times exists. This is why you guys
do what you do, because this stuff happens to real folks.”

Want to fight back? Contact the Foundation for Child Victims
of the Family Court Here

Rosalynn Michelle
McGinnis, now 33, said she was able to escape last year from a filthy tent with
eight of her nine children. She made her way to a U.S. Embassy, investigators
said in court documents, the paper reported.

Her eldest child is
grown and escaped before her, she said. They have since been reunited, she
said.

In an interview with Peoplemagazine, McGinnis said she was speaking
publicly because “I want the world to know. I want him to be stopped and I want
justice to be served.”

She was beaten with a
baseball bat, raped, stabbed, shot and choked unconscious during nearly two
decades with Piette, she said.

He has been charged in
Wagoner County. He “married” her in a van after kidnapping her from school, she told investigators.
Her mother had left Piette because he beat her and the mom and daughter were
living in a women’s shelter, McGinnis said.

McGinnis and Piette’s
children were dragged across states including Texas, Montana and Arizona,
according to FBI agents.

Ultimately, they
landed in Mexico, where they lived in a tent in a remote village.

After 19 years of
abuse, and recovering from a crude surgery to remove her gallbladder, McGinnis
decided it was now or never.

“I knew that if I
didn’t get out of there,” she told the magazine. “I’d either go insane or I
would end up dying and leaving my kids with that man.”

Back in the U.S.,
McGinnis has been working the JAYC Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit began by
Jaycee Dugard, who was abducted at age 11 in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., before
she was rescued after 18 years.

She also has been
helped by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“It took a lot of
courage. It took a lot of bravery,” Robert Lowery, vice president of missing children for the organization, told the
publication.

“She wasn’t only
concerned for herself,” he said, “but for her children.”

SANILAC COUNTY, Mich. — A Michigan man who allegedly raped a
girl when she was 12 years old and got her pregnant has been given joint
custody of her child.

Christopher Mirasolo, 27, is accused of raping the victim and
getting her pregnant in September 2008, according to The
Detroit News. He was 18 and she was 12.

The victim’s attorney, Rebecca Kiessling, says Mirasalo lured
the victim, her 13-year-old sister and a friend into his car and took them to a
vacant home in Michigan and held them captive for two days before releasing
them.

Mirasolo was arrested a month later and sentenced to one year in
jail for attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct. He served roughly half
the time before he was released to care for his sick mother.

In 2010, Mirasolo was convicted of the assault of another child
and given four years in jail.

According to The Detroit News, after a paternity test showed
Mirasolo was the father, he was given parenting time and joint custody of the
child.

U.S. Calvary stand at the edge of a mass grave where hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were buried after the Wounded Knee Massacre on 29 December 1890. The Lakota pipe line has now cut through their sacred burial ground.

American cavalry troops pose at the edge of
a mass grave for some of the victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

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It has been said that Sunday’s mass shooting in Las
Vegas in which Stephen Paddock open fire with assault weapons modified to fire
automatically on a large crowd of concertgoers is the worst in American
history. That’s not even close to being accurate.

Others more correctly say that Las Vegas was the worst
mass killing in modernAmerican history. Depending on how you define
“modern,” that is closer to accurate.

Paddock's body count of 58 dead victims surpassed the
49 murdered by Omar Mateen when he opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub in
Orlando in June 2016. That led some to proclaim this killing spree to be the
worst.

But the history of mass shootings didn’t begin 20 or 30
years ago — or even when Charles Whitman opened fire from the clock tower
at the University of Texas in 1966.

You don’t have to go back much further in American history
to find slaughters even bigger than Vegas. You can start with Wounded Knee on what
is now the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, Chief
Spotted Elk (Big Foot), leader of a band of some 350 Minneconjou Sioux, sat in
a makeshift camp along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. The band was surrounded
by U.S. troops sent to arrest him and disarm his followers. The atmosphere was
tense, since an order to arrest Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock
Reservation just 14 days earlier had resulted in his murder, prompting Big Foot
to lead his people to the Pine Ridge Agency for safe haven. Alerted to the
band’s Ghost Dance activities, General Nelson Miles commanded Major Samuel
Whiteside and the Seventh Cavalry to apprehend Big Foot and his followers, and
the regiment intercepted them on December 28, leading them to the edge of the
creek. While confiscating their weapons, a shot pierced the brisk morning air.
Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as the Indian men rushed to retrieve
their confiscated rifles and troopers began to fire volley after volley into
the Sioux camp. From a hill above, a Hotchkiss machine gun raked the tipis, gun
smoke filled the air, and men, women, and children ran for a ravine near the
camp, only to be cut down in crossfire. More than 200 Lakota lay dead or dying
in the aftermath as well as at least 20 soldiers.

The number of victims at Wounded Knee varies widely,
depending on which account you read, from 150 up to 300. But whatever the
number, it apparently doesn’t count as “modern.”

And then there is the Sand Creek Massacre of November 29,
1864, in which Colorado volunteers under the command of Col. John Chivington
slaughtered and mutilated anywhere from 70-163 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of
whom were women and children.

There was one little child, probably three
years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone
ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little
fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his
horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire.
He missed the child. Another man came up and said, 'let me try the son of a b-.
I can hit him.' He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the
little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar
remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.

— Major Anthony, New York Tribune, 1879

And then there was the white mob that attacked and burned the Greenwood community
of African-Americans in Tulsa, Okla., on May 31-June 1, 1921, killing as many
as 300.

As with some of the others, the Tulsa riot
seemed to have started with the explosive accusation that a black man had
sexually assaulted a white woman. (The charges were dropped after the riot.)

On May 31, 1921, hundreds of armed white men
gathered outside the courthouse where the man was being held, and a group of
armed black men arrived to prevent a lynching. A shot was fired. The black men
fled to Greenwood, and the white men gave chase.

The battle that ensued, enabled by the Tulsa police chief,
who deputized hundreds of white men and commandeered gun shops to arm them,
lasted through the night and well into the next day.

When the New York Times wrote that story in 2011 on the
Greenwood killings many survivors were still alive. But it apparently doesn’t
qualify as “modern.”

There were other mass killings. The Colfax Massacre of
1873 in Louisiana resulted in 150 deaths of African-Americans. The list goes on and on.

Many of those massacres have been largely forgotten by a
nation that often wants to erase its bloody history.

Thus the necessity, perhaps, to make a distinction between
modern history and all of history.

In practical terms, one reason is that it's difficult to
determine the exact number of victims murdered in the 19th century — a problem
that persists today, too. There's also a vocabulary issue, as different
words used to describe similar events can affect perceptions of their
significance. "The mid-2000s is around the time that the phrase 'mass
shootings' started being used more and more," Duwe says, "whereas
during the 1980s and the 1990s, the phrase 'mass murder' is used." (His
research uses the term mass public shooting to describe
incidents in which four or more victims are killed with a gun in a public
location.)

There’s that. But that’s not the real reason. Emphasis
added.

Many have argued this week and in the past that events
like the Colfax Massacre and Wounded Knee are seen as separate because, within
American history, the deaths of Native Americans and African Americans
have not been seen the same as the deaths of white people — and that
failing to specify "modern" history while talking about events like
Las Vegas only underscores that idea by implying that earlier shootings don't
count.

Massacres of Indians larger than Wounded Knee (I have left out slaughters that happened as part of British and French warfare, or as part of military engagements in the Civil War):

1637: 600-700 Pequot were burned alive in their Connecticut village and escaping survivors shot to death

1644: 500 sleeping Lenape in New York were either burned alive or shot trying to escape